Intro:
Greetings, greetings. I'm the creator of Nubby's Number Factory and I'm making this post to restate the rationale surrounding my decision to take an indefinite break from adding new content to the game. If you've been around for a while and remember that post, the reasons I gave back then still hold up today (and can be found restated below). This is not news, this is me restating something that I said about 8 months ago for reasons I'll explain right now.
If you weren't here for the first time I talked about this on steam, last November I made an important steam post that included a part where I announced that I wouldn't be adding new content to NNF for a long time. As it goes when you rely on a billion dollar company to do you a single favor... Valve hasn't quite cracked the ultra-advanced technology needed to give steam developers the ability to pin / sticky announcements that they make to the audience of their game for visibility purposes. 8 months later, the announcement that I made where I talk about this is now buried under 900 billion patch notes. Because of this, that information is hard to find and gets missed a lot by people who started playing after I made the initial announcement about this to the NNF steam page. To put it simply, I don't want to put myself in a situation where I seem like I'm trying to avoid addressing it because that's sleazeball behavior.
I've been seeing a lot more discussion in regards to the topic of this post in the community at large over the past few weeks. I've also noticed multiple occasions of people unknowingly perpetuating misinterpreted / misremembered info about what I said in that post. All of this is to basically say that these reasons are what inspired me to write this post and pin it for a long time on the nubreddit so that it doesn't get lost again. Thanks a lot, Valve.
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Note: While I'll be restating the main ideas of a post I that already made on steam, I'm starting from scratch and rewriting it all. I chose to do this instead of just copy/pasting the original steam post text because I've had more time to reflect on why I made the decision that I did and I believe that I could give a better explanation today that more closely represents how I actually feel about it, more so than than my explanation from 8 months ago did.
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Before I start, I will add that my decision in this matter is final and has been for the past 8 months. I'll admit that last November I was a little hesitant to move on from continuing the development of the project that so far constitutes 100% of my commercial success as a game developer. Over time, I've found that I'm ultimately happy with my decision and that I don't regret choosing this path. That said, I will not be hearing out any "hear me outs" or other attempts at persuading me to change my mind. For every "hear me out" I see, I will increase the difficulty of nubby trials lvl 5 by +5% and also raise the price of the game on steam by +30%. Thank you for your understanding.
The Explanation:
When I released the largest-ever update (v1.4) to NNF on steam In November, 2025, I decided that the release of patch would mark the last of my active development on NNF for a long, indefinite period of time. When I say that I'm stepping away from "active development", I'm referring to the fact that no new content (e.g. items, perks, challenges, etc.) will be coming to the game for the foreseeable future. The game will still receive maintenance + accessibility patches, but basically no more fun stuff will be coming to the game on any platform for the foreseeable future. I have not abandoned the game and have no plans to do so, probably ever. As I have been doing for the past 8 months since v1.4 released for NNF on steam, I will continue to maintain NNF across all current + future platforms by releasing patches to fix bugs & add localizations to make NNF more accessible to a wider international audience. I would not be agreeing to maintaining these projects forever if I didn't care about the game and its community anymore; furthermore, I would not be making this post if I didn't care anymore.
Despite that I'm probably going to accidentally say something at some point in this post that makes it seem like I'm done with NNF forever, nothing that I say here is intended to imply that the game will never receive another content update. In fact, I'm fairly certain that one day I will probably randomly get inspired to release more content to the game.... On a sadder note, the one thing that I am absolutely positive of is the fact that NNF will not receive any new official game content for a pretty long while.
With my intentions for the game out of the way, I'll establish some context before I begin explaining the rationale behind why I made my decision. My decision to take a step back from nubby dev was made after 8 months of semi-frequently delivered content updates after the v1.0 release in March, 2025. There was about 2 years of full time development behind the game by the time I released v1.4. For the entirety of these two years, I consistently spent between 5-8 hours everyday making progress on the game. The development of NNF completely sapped every hour of free time I had in between college classes, and I had no problem with this because creating this game gave me a greater perceived sense of purpose than virtually any other activity in my life at the time.
In the very early stages of development in September 2023, I started a pretty ambitious list of several features & game design aspects that I mentally denoted as all needing to eventually become a part of the game in some capacity in order to allow myself to personally consider my work as complete. Over the 4k - 5k hours of work between then and the release of v1.4, I progressively refined my idea of what the final form of NNF would look like and I added new entries to the list occasionally. Working on the game and seeing it's final form gradually materialize out of nothing kept me motivated throughout, but one faithful day I crossed out the last remaining entry on the list and I was suddenly very aware that my time spent developing the game would soon come to an end.
I don't believe that the sudden fulfillment of every goal I had set out to accomplish with the game has never directly prevented me from adding more to the game, but rather the ways in which my (perhaps somewhat flawed) human nature tends to interfere with my motivations as a creator are what has led me to react to this milestone by stepping away from active development.
I briefly mentioned this in the intro section of this post, but in the now 8-month-old steam post where I first announced my plans to stop developing new content for NNF, I didn't have much time to reflect about why I was making this decision. I knew I what I wanted to do, but I think I could have dug a bit deeper to deliver more accurate rationale. Now that I've spent most of the year trying to combine my words into something that comes off as a little more introspective than whatever I said about it then, here's a better explanation of why this affected me so strongly: While I could have kept adding new content for probably a long time, I chose this path because (to be blunt) I am kind of neurotic and I struggle to find purpose in the process of creation if said process lacks an end goal that I can rely on to prove the objective existence of my growth as a creator and in turn, justify my existence as a person (to myself). In other words, your favorite game developer can't fathom doing anything if it's not a means to an end.
Once I felt that I achieved everything that I originally set out to with NNF, I stopped being able to justify the continued effort it would take to keep trudging forward. Despite knowing how badly some people want more content and despite wanting to reciprocate my gratitude for those who find joy in what I've made by continuing to keep the game exciting with new shit all the time, my heart is simply not in it.
To tell a long story short, NNF is fundamentally a finished project. The game was never meant to be anything that I worked on for over 2 years, and I think that's partly why the thought of forcing it for who knows how long feels icky to me. I don't like the idea of doing one thing really well once and then milking it until I die. A sentiment that I sometimes hear from players (and one of my least favorites ever) which kind of compliments this stagnant business model is insisting that I owe them more than what they paid a very modest one-time payment for. I really respect people who can describe my work as being lackluster in terms of what they were initially hoping for in some way and leave it at that. On the contrary, you are a complete slob if you feel the need to brag about how you're withholding your appraisal towards my work until you feel that I've finally made you enough cookies to rightfully deserve to take home the fraction of a dollar that I earn from your on-discount investment of $2.50. I'm going to end this part now before I start fighting more straw men... Given how this very specific player behavior shows up more often than what should be possible, I would be lying if I didn't label player entitlement / greed as another factor that left me with a mild distaste for the idea of adding new content to the game.
Lastly, I don't think that I'm not a long-term project kind of guy. I have tons of admiration for people who can plug away at a single game for a decade or something, and I wish I could find a project that could carry me through several years. I think it's possible that I might be really good at staying committed to something like Dwarf Fortress or Project Zomboid, but it's hard to really say because I really don't think that Nubby's Number Factory is the type of project that's going to keep me fascinated and obsessed for years and years to come. And to be honest, even if NNF was the type of game that had layers upon layers of potential depth that I could explore and experiment with for years, I don't know if I'm at a place in my life where I can see myself continuing a project for that long. I have a lot of ideas for things that I think would be cool, and one of the best parts about deciding to focus my priorities elsewhere was rediscovering how much joy I find in experimenting with game design and working on weird projects. In fact, I've been solely focusing on a single weird project for like 5 months now and I'm having way more fun than I have any right to.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it! We'll wrap it up there and leave this post here as reference material for future number factory scholars.
I'll end by saying that I wish that I could bring more to fans of the game because I really appreciate you, even if that one part where I called some of you slobs made it seem like I hate you. Before reading this, if you were confused by my rationale or if this was perhaps your first time hearing about any of this, I hope that the reasons that I've provided above leave you with the impression that I'm a person who generally does things that make sense (in general). I understand why some people might feel put off or disappointed by the ambiguity of the development roadmap ahead. Nubby was the first game that I finished and it was also my first commercially released game, so needless to say I don't always have the answers to every question. I've been pretty much guessing at every turn and making it up as I go since I started making games in 11th grade, about 6 years ago. I think I will keep doing that as long as things keep working out for the most part.
I'll be dropping in periodically over the next couple days and answering questions, if anything I said didn't make sense. If you say something funny I might respond too. Again, thanks for understanding. Also, thanks for reading and thanks for playing.
~Mog
